Chamber and committees

Some of those authorities will be risk averse and they may not be up for the radical change that might be required. Should we be looking at the carrot approach rather than the stick approach that is sometimes used? Is there potential for a change fund to be set aside that local authorities could bid into when there is a real, defined programme of reform that the fund could facilitate?

Thank you.

My final question is on a huge area of reform that we expected to see: the national care service. The Government announced a couple of weeks ago that huge parts of that will no longer be taken forward. There have been years of planning, consultation and development with a price tag of upwards of £30 million. If we cannot see meaningful reform after all that work, time, effort and money, is it time to lose hope that the real, radical reform that we need in local authority services will happen?

The next area that I want to cover is work on the fiscal framework. We have heard from the Government that it expects to produce at least a version of that framework by the end of this month, but what engagement have you had with COSLA and the Scottish Government on it? Is there anything that you explicitly expect to be in that document when it is published?

In last week’s debate, I was struck by an SNP member’s comment that

“this is a good and clever budget”.—[Official Report, 30 January 2025; c 102.]

I believe that a good budget provides the financial backing to deliver the Government’s priorities. John Swinney has said repeatedly that the Government’s priority is to tackle child poverty, but to my mind, it is impossible to do that without making sure that every child has a warm, secure and affordable house to live in and without relying on the services and support that are provided by local government across Scotland.

I have just started my speech and I want to make some progress. I will maybe come back to the cabinet secretary.

I welcome the Government’s decision to reverse last year’s cut to the affordable housing programme. That is a good decision—or, I should say, part of a good decision, because what the Government has not said is that it actually cut the affordable housing supply budget twice. It cut it last year and the year before that, and the full cut over the two years has not been restored.

The Government’s approach to affordable housing is one of the clearest indicators of what Audit Scotland has called “short-term” thinking that balances budgets

“but risks disrupting services ... and restricting progress towards ... long-term outcomes”.

With the chaos that was unleashed by this Government’s housing budget cuts, more than 500 more children have woken up in temporary homes. As Shelter Scotland’s director, Alison Watson, said,

“No child should be living in poverty and the only way to eradicate child poverty is to end child homelessness.”

During the SNP’s time in Government, far from ending child homelessness, it has seen the number of kids in temporary homes almost double, increasing by 85 per cent between 2007 until 2024.

Although I welcome the partial reinstatement of those desperately needed funds, it is important to set out what the Government’s disastrous approach has done to the supply of affordable housing in Scotland, because we are just not building enough homes. Astonishingly, the SNP’s latest affordable housing pledge actually promises a drop in the number of affordable homes to be built. The Government has said that this year’s affordable homes budget will enable

“over 8000 new properties ... to be built this coming year”,

and the cabinet secretary said in her speech that the budget will build more affordable homes. However, that is the lowest number of new affordable homes in any year since 2016-17, excluding the pandemic. For the past three years, even amid the most brutal cuts to the affordable housing supply budget, between 9,500 and 10,400 new affordable homes were completed each year. I can only assume that the attempt to present failure as success means that the Government is quietly giving up on its pledge to build 110,000 homes by 2032.

The point that I am trying to make is that the UK Government has provided this Parliament—this budget—with £5.2 billion in extra funding. Instead of making transformative change to lift kids out of poverty and put them into the houses that they need, the Scottish Government is simply fixing the problems that it has made over the past 18 years. Restoring—not even fully restoring—the cuts that were made in last year’s budget and the budget before that does not go anywhere near the ambition that we have for this country.

We have been clear that the reason that this Government has extra money to spend—£5.2 billion—is because of a Labour Government delivering for Scotland. We expect to see transformation in our public services—[Interruption.]

In dialogue with the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government and ministers, my front-bench colleagues have constructively asked for that funding to be used for the transformation of the public sector in Scotland, not for fixing the problems that the SNP has made for itself in the past. That has been borne out by the reaction to this budget by organisations—

I am in my last minute, and I am told that there is no time in hand. Organisation after organisation, and report after report from Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission, from which we heard this morning at the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, have made it clear that this budget is a short-term fix. There is no forward thinking. The budget will not address the fundamental problems that the Scottish Government has stored up for the past 17 years.

The other area that I will touch on when it comes to the inability to tackle child poverty, which I mentioned, is local government. The local government budget has increased—which is welcome—but it will not cover the past 10 years’ worth of budget cuts, which amount to a cumulative £6 billion.

It is clear that the biggest demonstration in the budget is that the Government has run out of ideas and that we need the new direction that comes with a new Labour Government.